Pictured: a book with the worst greatest title I’ve ever seen

In 1847, a woman named Charlotte Bronte wrote a novel titled “Jane Eyre”, a sort of “changeling” tale of an unloved young woman who falls in love with a blunt and moody Byronic anti-hero (who is, admittedly, putting up something of a facade of jerkiness as a defense mechanism). To make a very long story short, even the fact that the man has his first wife chained up in the attic (due to hereditary insanity or brain fever or some other medical issue that only exists in Victorian novels) doesn’t make them separate, and of course he is humbled to necessitate the love of a good woman redeeming him.

From this 19th century publication, the genre conventions of what we know today as the romance novel began to take hold, and the genre began to proliferate at the beginning of the 20th century.

In 1919, a woman by the name of Edith Hull wrote a novel titled “The Sheik“. It is the story of a frigid and unfeminine woman that is “thawed” and “tamed” by a lusty, hyper-masculine barbarian who accomplishes this by basically raping her every day and night for a month straight, ending with her staying with him willingly. This book, and its 1921 film adaptation starring a wolfish, priapic, practically frothing-at-the-mouth Rudolph Valentino, proceeded to move thousands of copies of the book, fill theaters, and, around the world, drench step-ins or whatever women wore as underwear back then (my knowledge of women’s fashion of the 1920s comes from pulp fiction, so excuse my ignorance).

Are you starting to see a pattern here?

In 2000-whatever (I’m not going to bother looking up the date, deal with it), a very sexually-inexperienced young woman named E.L. James wrote “Fifty Shades of Grey“, which is basically the exact same story as “The Sheik“, but in modern times and with two white people. Unlike the previous two, I have never seen the film or read the book, and I have no plans to. Much like Edith Hull’s magnum opus, the release of this media franchise has moistened panties around the world. (Parenthetically, my cursory research showed that “Fifty Shades” started its life as a “Twilight” fan fiction, and the source material is another example of a studly douchebag abusing a naive virgin and receiving her love in return, with the caveat that Edward Cullen’s abuse is strictly emotional rather than physical. So let’s throw Stephanie Meyer into the “sexually naive woman writing pornography” column.)

And in 2015, I went to the supermarket and picked up a Harlequin romance novel. Wouldn’t you know it, it’s about the same thing that every other goddamned book mentioned in this article is about.

Beyond the realms of crappy literature, hybristophilia is a documented sexual fetish in which sexual arousal, climax, and facilitation are stimulated by having a partner or object of desire that is guilty of some sort of crime. Death row inmates regularly receive love letters and marriage proposals from awestruck women.

You can probably figure out what I’m getting at. Of the “figured it out” group, some might be protesting:

“But that’s not all women! That’s not what my female church pastor/a female guest writer on A Voice For Men told me women want!”

Yeah…it took me a while to realize this but: if you are a man, then women, or at least the “official women” defined below, will never, EVER, give you good advice on how to attract women  (some women, thankfully, do not have their heads up their asses, but all “official women” are completely clueless about everything, including the things they’re supposed to be experts on). If you take their advice, you will be cast into the abyss of involuntary celibacy. Essentially, they (“they” referring to the unelected collective spokeswomen for women, that have until very recently been the only people writing about sexual dynamics) have acted out that old saying “Do as I say, not as I do”. But I say to hell with that saying, let’s pay attention to what they do instead!

Oh, look at that, a Reddit thread where women talk about their attraction to scumbags. Here’s two women talking about how they frittered away their youths with “caged animals” before each settled down with a boring provider. Both women barely attempt to hide their emotions.

Here’s another woman talking about how, 50 years after a roll in the hay with a brooding stud ripped right from a Charlotte Bronte novel, she still fantasizes about him over her lame-o husband. And so on and so forth. Seems to me that there’s a commonality to what women want.

Before I get to the title of this article, I want to briefly talk about what women DO NOT want, and what they don’t want, more than anything else, is a man that supplicates to them: they don’t want a “kitchen bitch”, despite the fact that they have literally spent the last 30 years claiming that’s what they want. You would literally have a better chance with a woman if you walked up to her and punched her right in the mouth, then if you walked up to her and immediately averted your eyes, started mumbling, and genuflecting before her. Don’t believe me? Look at how difficult many women find it to escape their abusive husbands (“on average, a women will ‘leave’ an abusive relationship seven times before she leaves for good”)

To the morons in the audience that read the last paragraph, I am certainly not advocating the abuse of women, but rather to show how supplication to a woman is so loathsome to her that even the heinousness of physical abuse is preferable.

“Aha! Women only want jerks!” says the idiot Mystery Method holdout-not so fast, dingus. Given the choice between a simpering, man-boobed wuss and a “caged animal”, a woman will always go for the caged animal (at least until they hit the wall*), but in my opinion, it’s not necessarily the criminality that attracts women, so much as it is the expression of raw masculinity that attracts them. In the words of Jack Donovan, a great inspiration to me if you haven’t noticed, “there is a difference between being a good man and being good at being a man” (The Way of Men, Chapter 8, “On Being a Good Man”). In other words, masculinity is not intrinsically tied with moral “goodness”-you can be an absolute monster and still show strength, courage,mastery/intelligence, and honor-and women are receptive to those four things. All of the “Dark Triad” stuff that SMV (sexual market value) geeks like to talk about shows those four virtues-arrogance and a biting wit show intelligence, the committing of crimes can show any (or possibly all) of the four, etc. etc.

(Yes, I’m aware of the irony of citing the writing of an open homosexual as advice for attracting women)

But with all this being said, I don’t think you necessarily have to become a criminal or a jerk to get women (I repeat, DO NOT run out of your house and hold up a liquor store, idiot)-you can show those four virtues constructively, and apply some of the darker implications occasionally when necessary. What I mean by “darker implications” is: show dominance, firmness, and assertiveness in making decisions with your woman. Get a little rough when you have sex with her-she’ll like it, I promise.

Another thing that drug dealers, crappy musicians, and other scumbags have as a sexual advantage: they’re interesting. Mr. Rochester was also interesting. So was Sheik Ahmed. So was Christian Grey. Getting the idea?

I’d much rather have a chat with any of them, as flawed as they were, then talk to some white collar schlub who literally does nothing besides work, surf the internet, masturbate, and sleep. And what is it that the manosphere implicitly advocates, more than anything else? That’s right-making yourself a more interesting person through fitness, learning talents, becoming well read, and more.

So, to answer the arching question of “what women want”, in my experience, what women want is a man that is masculine, interesting, accomplished, gently dominant, and knows that there’s a time to “unleash the beast”, and does so on occasion. Women, to put it bluntly, want a man who knows when to take charge and lead the way-emotionally, culturally, socially, and sexually.

 *I believe it was HL Mencken that stated (paraphrasing) “in love, men are the fantasists, the romantics, while women are the realists, the pragmatists”. The rather coarse internet catch phrase “alpha fux, beta bux” (ie: debauch until “the wall” is in sight, then sink your claws into some dateless wonder with a steady job who will fall head over heels in love with you), which certainly applies to, at the very least, some amount of women, says it all.